A key focus of this blog is the history of Jacksons in Ireland. I am specially curious about those who may be related to Sir Thomas Jackson (1841-1915). His life is key to understanding how a dozen or so young men, sons of Irish tenant farmers, shaped the future of international banking in the Far East in the late 1800s. I also use this blog as a place for playful posts: book and restaurant reviews, recipes, and events in my life. WARNING: Note the date of each post. Some may be outdated.

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Tuesday, January 31, 2012

In 1842, if the Primate of Armagh had succeeded in outlawing
certain kinds of Presbyterian marriages in Ireland, then the future Sir Thomas
Jackson would have been legally declared a bastard. After all, his father was an
Episcopalian, aka an Anglican, or a
member of the Church of Ireland , while
his mother was a fervent Presbyterian. They had been married at 1st Ballybay
Presbyterian church by a Presbyterian minister. Unfortunately for them, High Church Episcopalians, such as the Primate of Armagh,
a hereditary landlord named Lord George John de Poer Beresford, definitely did
not approve. Along with many of the members of the so-called Ascendancy, he regarded these liaisons as: irregular marriages.

It is often strange how changes in law regularly get triggered
by something that seems on the face of it to be so utterly tangential. This legal
shift started in the 1840s when Dr. Miller, the surrogate of the Primate of
Armagh, as part of a ruling on a bigamy case was able to declare irregular marriages to be null and void when they were performed by
a Presbyterian Minister. His ruling rested on the precedence of a Saxon law passed
in the Tenth Century that required that a priest
be present to solemnize a marriage. Of course, a priest back in the Tenth Century could not have been Anglican, since Henry VIII had yet to be
born. Details, details. That kind of irrelevancy
didn’t daunt the Primate. He used his own money to help to fund this case, and he
also used his not inconsequential influence to tilt the laws against the needs
of Presbyterian families.

Not unsurprisingly, this ruling opened a whole new can of
worms. There was now uncertainty over existing marital property agreements as
well as inheritances linked to marriage portions. It meant that dead-beat dads
could and did legally cut loose from financial responsibilities to their wives
and children. It also would result in a whole new cohort of children who were
now legally termed: bastard. Had the
ruling gone unchallenged, the future Sir Thomas would have been one of them.

It took a second legal case to totally put the cat amongst
the pigeons. Fast on the heels of this first judgement, a similar case in
Antrim was referred to the Court of Queen’s Bench in Ireland for decision. Since
the judges in this case were divided, the issue got punted on to the House of
Lords for a ruling. After much debate, the Lords were split when it came to a
vote, so the custom of presumitur pro
negate prevailed . This meant that the ruling tilted in favour of the one who denied – aka the defendant. The
result was that the bigamous defendant wiggled out of his sticky wicket, but it
was now the entire Presbyterian community that was stuck between a rock and a
hard place.

It is hard to believe that the Primate’s itch to make these irregular marriages declared illegal wasn’t
provoked by other issues, including the usual provocation: money. After all, Presbyterian activism in the Tenant Rights
movements felt threatening to those holding the reins of Anglican landlord
power. Just a few years earlier, in 1850, Rev. David Bell of Derryvalley, Co.
Monaghan had ended a speech at the Belfast Music Hall with the rousing In the name of Justice, in the name of
humanity, in the name of mercy, in the awful name of God, I call upon Lord John
Russell.... to render the poor man’s property as sacred as that of the rich.

It is therefore no surprise that Thomas Jackson’s uncle and future
mentor, Rev. Daniel Gunn Brown, was a key mover of one of the resolutions to be
forwarded to Parliament.

MOVED by the REV DANIEL GUNN
BROWN: That by this unexpected decision,
not only are the feelings deeply wounded of more than one half of the
Protestants of Ireland, but the rights of property, in innumerable cases, may
be unsettled and overthrown: a consequence hurtful to the best interests of
society, and affording many opportunities for base and heartless miscreants to
violate, with impunity, solemn vows, and desert those whom, by the laws of God
and man, they are bound to protect and cherish.

Now this is the kind of story that I could never have found
all by myself. Luckily for me, the news clipping was included in a scrapbook
assembled by Kieran McConville. On my most recent trip to Armagh, we were
unable to meet, but he kindly drove up to Armagh to leave it for me at TheIrish & Local Studies Library so I could photograph the parts I had missed
when I first saw the collection at the Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiaich Memorial Librarya few years earlier.

I didn’t measure it, I am guessing that it is a good eight
inches thick,, eighteen inches wide, and two feet tall.

That day in Armagh, I took 322 photos of the pages of this
book, and each page includes anywhere up to six news clippings. I have already entered
the ones that describe births, death or marriages of people pertinent to the
story of Thomas Jackson in my website or in my family tree. News items that connect
to the experiences of the families that I am following will also be
transcribed, and annotated, in much the same way as the article that I posted
relating to this issue of Presbyterian Marriages.

It is through the actions of transcribing these articles, then
checking out the back story, and then annotating the news clippings accordingly
accordingly that I am able to get a much more complete picture of many of the
events in Creggan Parish from 1748 to
the early 1900s. By sharing it, we all learn – and I am happy to be corrected
if I have misunderstood anything in this tale.

As the narrator in an early 60s TV show, used to say: There are eight million stories in The Naked
City. This has been one of them.

Saturday, January 21, 2012

Curious pictures begin to take shape when you stare at birth
records, deeds and other such mind-numbing documents for long enough. It
reminds me of when my husband and I used to develop black and white negatives
in our darkroom in the basement. It was like watching a time release film of a
bud opening into a flower. Slowly, the image on the paper would sharpen in the
watery bath of chemicals under the glow of the soft red light. Not that anyone
does this much anymore, but I remember well the feeling of watching the picture
emerge.

I’ll get to the unchurched
bit that I referred to in the title of this piece – just give me a moment. This
is after all, merely a blog, not The News of The World – although look where
their playing up the muck got them.

For a decade now, I have been mucking about in hundreds of
documents trying to make sense of a great swat of Olivers who peopled rural
Armagh from the late 1600s onwards. A few of them also lived and/or conducted
business in the city of Armagh, often referred to as the City of Saints and Scholars. You can blame Eliza Oliver, the mother
of Sir Thomas Jackson, and my great-great-grandmother for this obsession of
mine. After all, it was her legacy of letters
which started me on all this.

The story is that her Olivers had initially immigrated to
Ireland as Huguenots after the revocation of the Treaty of Nantes in October 1685.
It appears that her family, like many, had secured an early foothold in the
burgeoning linen industry in Northern Ireland. Missing records make some of
this story tricky to authenticate, but the story has seemed to be a good fit as
far as it is currently possible to prove.

Recently, an unknown fact about one of her cousins, a
William Oliver, turned up in a most unexpected place: the church records of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The reason that this
was unexpected was that this was not the Protestant St. Patrick’s, but rather
it was the Catholic one.

It turned out that this William had fathered not only one,
but two children, unchurched, as my
great-aunt Blin would have put it, and both of them with the same woman - a
Mary Anne Mallon aka Mullan. Their son Benjamin was baptised on August 21, 1841, likely on the day of his birth. Their daughter Sarah
was both born and baptised 31 Aug 1844.

The story gets curiouser,
as Alice in Wonderland would say. In PRONI – aka The Public Records Office of
Ireland – I found a will abstract that makes this relationship between Willaim
and Mary Anne, well, as I said: curiouser:

So, who was this Mary, wife of William Oliver, and what was
her relationship to Mary Anne Mullen? This is where I hoping that kind readers
can help me.

Clearly, a next step is to
get this Mary Oliver’s death certificate. Since she was described as a wife, not as a widow, perhaps her husband William Oliver may be further
identified in that document.

A second step would be to
find a death certificate for Mary Anne Mullen, which would be some time
after 1892. This should give us an idea of her approximate birth date. It
turns out that there were 64 Mary Mallons recorded in the 1901 Census, but
all the likely ones are described as widow,
which may or may not be true. My guess is that Mary Anne Mullan died
before 1901.

A few further questions to
pursue are: Did this William Oliver marry a Mary after he conceived children with Mary Anne Mullen aka Mallon,
or are they two different William Olivers? Did William Oliver’s wife Mary raise
the children of her husband’s unmarried partner? Is there any record of
these children, other than their birth? None of the Sarah Olivers in Irish
census records look to be a fit, and there is not a single Benjamin Oliver
in either the 1901 or the 1911 census. I suspect that this is a result of emigration,
rather than premature death.

For now, I have placed this William Oliver as a son of William
OLIVER of Ennislare and Brootally, Co. Armagh and Elizabeth BALLANTYNE. The
links to this information are beneath. Another William Oliver, who I have yet
to place and whose photo is beneath, would have only been thirteen years old at the time of the birth of first
child with Mary Anne Mallon, so I doubt that it was him.

On the front of the photo: Yours truly,
William [Oliver]On the back
of this photo is written (in different handwriting than on the front of the
photo):Height: 5 feet 5 inchesWeight - 8 stone 13 lbsDark complexionAge 18 years and 3 monthsLeft his country for his
country's goodA.C. NICHOLSPhotographist62 Deleware St.,Leavenworth, Kansas

Regardless of what we have yet to learn, this was an interfaith
relationship that was carried out over some time, and it may turn out that it
is one of many in this particular Oliver line. It is likely not a fluke that while
there were initially dozens of Protestant Olivers in Armagh up until the
mid-1800s, the preponderance of those who show up later in the records are mostly
all Catholic.

It is also intriguing, given the interfaith aspect here, that
the William Oliver who fathered children with May Anne Mallon had a cousin, also
named William Oliver (abt 1810-1873), who was described as dying unchurched and who left £50 to his
housekeeper, Sarah Rock. I suspect that this Sarah was related in some way to
the Margaret Rock (born abt 1839) who married John Oliver (1841-1909) of
Ballycrummy and Tullymore. Their descendants still live and farm at
Ballycrummy. It may be that the story of the ROCK family in the region may
become the clue to unearthing more of this particular puzzle.

To help anyone who may be curious, I have recently uploaded
a few new compilations of data. There are close to a hundred pages of new
material here. SEE:

Friday, January 20, 2012

I realize that this may sound dangerously like something Dominique Strauss-Kahn said in New York last year, but I as for
The Moi, I have the more conventional kind of housekeeping in mind when I say: blame housekeeping. It was the main reason
that my blog enjoyed a month-long hiatus. Recent challenges
included not only the usual dishabille of hearth and home, but also my digital backlog.
The dust bunnies behind my sofa, aka the herd
of dust buffalo – given their size
and numbers, were absolutely nothing compared to the digital backlog that urgently
needed attention.

I don’t mean to insinuate that my computer caught a virus or
anything like that. Pas de fear. It
is just that my digital life was totally snowed in under an avalanche, and the
only tool that I had to dig myself out of it was a teaspoon.

The worst of started when I came home from Ireland late
October last year. I had piled dozens of new books, and hundreds of pages of
new documents onto the pool table in my study, but that was not the biggest challenge
that faced me. It was all the new digital material on my computer. Even I was
aghast at the scope of it.

The most daunting part was the more than 1,000 emails that I
had not yet read, let alone dealt with. Since 50-100 new emails were being added
daily – many of them either interesting or helpful or both - I feared that I would never catch up. Ever. To
make things worse, I then got flattened by a month-long flu. Think avalanche.
Think teaspoon. If I were writing this in the form of doggerel, then I might
have to say that I went from bad to verse.
Ooh – that was awful.

So, I quit blogging for a bit and amongst other things, I
attacked the pool table, and with good reason. The Christmas season is when
actually playing pool is a significant part of the family scene. I could have
thrown all my piles of papers into boxes, and hid them under my desk, but instead
I filed and processed each and every bit of paper. Well, most of them. There is
still one more half-sorted box to go. Still, I do plan to award myself a medal
for this accomplishment.

The really good part of my blogging hiatus is that my email
backlog is down to 145, from a high of 1,237. Just as importantly, the piles on
my side table are organized in terms of urgency. Hopefully, the wooden surface
beneath them will once again see the light of day.

I don’t mean to infer that I spent the entire past month doing
nothing but all of the above. There was also a wonderful amount of time spent
eating, drinking, conversing and cavorting as one does at this time of year. Amongst
other things, I reckon that I baked close to 50 loaves of bread that all were
consumed at the various family and community events:

My cup - aka my Bosch machine - overfloweth

One of our family pleasures included the stunning meals
prepared by my eldest daughter and her husband:

The seasonings in the eggplant and basil haunt me still - in a good way.

Another pleasure was joining dozens of others in a Roberts
Creek tradition as boats were set forth on January 1st:

Andreas' boat is one of these. Photo Credit: Micah Silver

Thankfully, our beach was readied for our 12th
Night party by Andreas and Micah. Now – that’s taking housekeeping to an
extreme point, but the log that they were wrestling with was totally blocking
our path to the beach.

Andreas in his Mennonite Mafia hat. The log is bigger than it looks in the picture.

With that and many more such tasks accomplished, not only
was Twelfth Night celebrated in fine form, our tradition was recorded in the Globe and Mail, and a heart-felt piece of writing was shared for the first time
with all and sundry:

Now that the aftermath has all been attended to, I am finally
back in the saddle, even if it is some forty-one days later. One of my plans for the rest
of 2012 is to post six pieces to my blog every month. Just as last
year, they will focus on my research and whatever else catches my eye. Books.
Food. You name it.

About Me

Author And Researcher. I am currently writing a book on the life of Sir Thomas Jackson. He was the son of tenant farmers, born just before the Famine in South Armagh, who was knighted because he not only lead HSBC into the 20th Century, but was also responsible for assisting with the funding of much of the economic development in China & Japan in the late 1800s. My first published book was "Some Become Flowers: Living with Dying at Home".